Child Taken: A chilling page-turner you will be unable to put down

by Darren Young

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Then make one up.’

  Danni thought about it. ‘It might work,’ she said.

  ‘He can only say no.’ Sam shrugged. ‘But I bet he won’t.’

  Danni left Sam at her gate and rehearsed the conversation on her way home. When she walked in, she made a cup of cocoa and put it outside the study door on her way past and called her father to tell him it was there. To her surprise he opened the door and, seizing the moment, she mentioned that she had a problem at work and he immediately wanted to know more. It was the first time she had seen a sign of life in his eyes since the night of the accident.

  ‘I’m tired, Dad. Can we talk properly tomorrow? Over dinner maybe?’

  Her father agreed straight away and said he would do whatever he could do to help her. Danni suspected he had been looking for this kind of opportunity to talk.

  It was a step forward.

  And, for the first night in quite a while, Danni slept soundly.

  12 | Danni

  ‘I just wish you’d stop fussing.’

  There wasn’t quite the progress Danni had hoped for when her father arrived at the restaurant, more than twenty minutes late and clearly preoccupied. He was in the clothes he had worn all week, unshaven, and his demeanour was colder than the previous night; he brushed away her questions about his welfare and clumsily moved the talk on to her work ‘problem’ at the first opportunity.

  ‘We can talk about it later,’ she told him, trying to take his hand, but he was acting like someone who had been coerced or even ambushed into a discussion he didn’t want to be part of.

  She thought about telling him about a real problem: that Euan had sent her three text messages that day, each giving the distinct impression that he thought there was more to the night he’d spent with her than she did. It would stop her having to lie, but then her father had never seen eye to eye with Euan, so she knew he would almost certainly react badly. And she’d have to say more than she wanted about what had happened after the funeral, and she already felt bad about that night on several levels – not just for leading Euan on, but for doing it so soon after her mother had been laid to rest.

  The thought of her mother made her try again to get behind her father’s façade, and for a second his eyes turned watery and she thought she might have succeeded, only for him to sense his own vulnerability, cough, and close up again, as if he had been about to say something and thought better of it.

  ‘What?’ she asked, encouragingly.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You can talk about her, you know … ’

  ‘I don’t need a counsellor, Danni.’

  ‘Maybe that’s exactly what you do need.’

  He looked angry with her and Danni gulped, not expecting the reaction. She had considered suggesting some professional help after the funeral but she was glad she hadn’t now. She waited for his anger to subside.

  ‘I don’t need to see anyone. What would I say? That she was such a wonderful person? That I’m upset she died? That I miss her? Big surprise.’

  ‘Dad!’

  He apologised and took his daughter’s outstretched hand and held it in both of his. ‘I’m just not ready to talk about it yet.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘Her. It. The accident. You know what I mean.’

  She squeezed his fingers and smiled.

  ‘Now what’s this problem at work?’

  Danni had concocted a reasonably plausible story about one of the dentists at the practice, but it seemed inappropriate at that moment. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I thought that was why we came here.’

  She nodded and told him it was just a personality clash and nothing that she couldn’t handle herself now she’d given it more thought.

  Her father smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be much help anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s been years since I’ve worked with humans.’

  Danni smiled too. That was true: her father’s freelance status meant he did most of his correspondence by email. Other than the odd interview as part of some field research, he hardly spoke to another person during his working week, and it had been a long time since he’d had to deal with anything approaching office politics.

  ‘But thank you for offering to help.’

  ‘No problem.’

  But there was a problem. Without a topic to hide behind, Danni could see his uncomfortable state return. When their food arrived, his relief at having a distraction was clear and they ate in near silence. Danni wondered how much of a corner they had turned, but she knew it wasn’t nearly as much as she had hoped.

  ‘Do you mind if I talk about Mum?’ she asked as her father finished his dessert.

  Thomas shook his head, although Danni could see it was reluctantly. But she needed to talk. He might not be ready to, she thought, but he could listen, even if just to help her. Danni tried to put some of her thoughts, jumbled as they were, into words. When she finished, she realised they all boiled down to one thing. ‘I suppose I’m just missing her,’ she said. His eyes became watery again. ‘I feel I’ve been cheated. That I didn’t get to tell her the things I wanted to.’

  She waited for her father to speak but he didn’t.

  ‘Do you feel that too?’

  He nodded, but as he started to speak – she could see the words forming – he stopped, seemingly not trusting himself to let them out.

  ‘I can’t believe she’s gone.’ Danni shook her head. ‘There are so many horrible people in this world, and she was so – so perfect, I guess.’

  She looked at her father but he looked away. She felt a chill run down her spine but wasn’t sure why; she just knew that she didn’t like the feeling. ‘Wasn’t she?’

  ‘Of course. More than you know.’

  Danni felt uneasy. His words were fine, but there was something in his eyes, something she wasn’t sure she wanted to explore, but knew she had to.

  ‘Then talk to me, Dad.’

  Her father let go of her hand, and loosened the neck of his crisp blue shirt as if it was cutting off his circulation. Danni waited for him to speak, but he looked as if he was trying to think of a way to do anything but.

  ‘I told you, I’m finding it hard,’ he said.

  ‘Hard to talk about the wonderful things she did? How can that be difficult?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘So is there something I don’t know?’

  The question had been there all along. It had been on her mind since her mother’s death. If she was honest, it had been there for much longer, but she hadn’t expected to bring it up, because, until Patricia’s untimely passing, Danni had always thought that her mother would be the one to answer it. Now that that was impossible, she knew that her father was the only one who could. She thought back to the conversation she had overheard and shuddered. He didn’t know she’d heard it, and she almost felt sorry for him; he was heading for an inevitable collision he didn’t even know was coming.

  For Danni, it was now a matter of when, not if, she would have to tell him.

  ‘Of course not.’

  Danni wasn’t an expert on body language but she had watched enough people in the waiting room at the dental surgery hiding their real fear behind a brave face and false bravado. Her father was in that waiting room now: knowing he was getting closer to going somewhere he didn’t want to, but with an inevitability to it all the same. She stared at him until he was forced to look back.

  ‘I said no.’

  He was stern, bordering on hostile, and demonstrating quite clearly that he wanted the conversation to end there. She knew she had to tread carefully in case she sent their relationship spiralling further in the opposite direction and forced him back to the solitude of his study, and she was prepared to wait for another, more suitable moment.

  ‘OK. I’m sorry.’

  Her father dismissed her apology with a wave of his hand, cleared his throat and drank the remaining coffee in his cup.

  ‘So anyway, w
hat’s happening with you and Euan?’

  Until then she had been sure her father hadn’t seen them together after the funeral.

  ‘We split up, remember?’

  ‘I know, but didn’t I see you talking the other night? At the—’

  Now Danni wanted to end the conversation quickly. ‘You did, but it was nothing,’ she said and looked away. ‘Still split up.’

  The mood had changed completely in that brief exchange. Danni felt embarrassed that her father might have seen them after all and, God forbid, heard them in her bedroom. It horrified her to imagine it; they’d always been a family where sex, in any context, was not a topic for discussion, especially for her father. In twenty years, she couldn’t remember her parents kissing in public, never mind any other physical sign of attraction.

  She thought about the night of the funeral: the short but satisfying outpouring of emotions. The way she had then let her hormones overpower her, and the way the grief in her had somehow exaggerated that desire, leading her into bed with Euan against her better judgement. She had been aware enough not to make lots of noise, but she hadn’t specifically tried to make none at all, if that were even possible.

  Danni felt herself getting uncomfortable, picturing her father sitting in his study drowning out the sound of their meaningless sex, on the day his wife’s body had been laid to rest. She blushed and felt her cheeks burn hot enough to reheat her drink. She finished it, hiding behind the cup, and then changed the subject to less important ones, like her plans for the weekend and her father’s next writing assignment.

  The mood had changed enough for her not to want to talk about her mother any more.

  Danni suspected that that was exactly what he’d intended.

  13 | Laura

  Laura went into work on the Monday morning determined to enjoy a better week, which wasn’t that much of a stretch given how bad the previous one had been. But she had no idea how much more eventful it would turn out to be.

  Although she took no delight in Sue’s sickness bug sweeping the offices of the paper, she wasn’t unhappy that three of the more established reporters had succumbed to it over the weekend, leaving the editor short of staff and with a glut of leads from the weekend that needed attention. When Laura walked in, twenty minutes early, he called her into his office and asked her to follow up on one of them and write a piece on a local farming dispute. Short and simple, he said, and, although she nodded, her head was already racing with ideas and angles, and by the time she was at her desk she had envisaged the headline on the front page.

  That headline – in fact, thoughts of any headline – was quickly quashed when she reached the farm that was the centre of the story. She climbed out of her car, her sensible shoes already squishing into the dark brown mud, and walked up to the dilapidated farmhouse where she met the owner, a farmer named Bob, who had been accused in an anonymous call to the council of covering up a disease in some of his animals. Laura found Bob a pleasant sort; on the surface at least he seemed very sincere and apologetic for the state of the house, and not a little surprised that the paper had even felt it necessary to send anyone to cover it.

  A non-story was how he referred to it at first, and Laura thought about Kelly’s warning, though she was determined to judge it for herself. But it quickly became obvious that he was right. The inspectors from DEFRA had already visited and given the farm the all-clear, and when Bob explained that the anonymous tip-off came just after an acrimonious meeting with his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her solicitor, which was the latest instalment of a nasty and protracted divorce, things fell neatly into place. When he also told her that the police had been sent to the farm twice previously after similar unsubstantiated claims, it became clearer still.

  ‘It’s costing me so much, I ain’t got enough left to live on,’ Bob told her with a defeated shrug, and she looked around at the crumbling walls and clear neglect and lost her appetite for the headline, feeling sorry for him when she left with barely a page of notes.

  When Laura got back to the office, and after she had salvaged her shoes as best she could in the ladies’ toilet, she set to work on her ‘story’ and quickly established that she could write it in five minutes and it might, if she was very lucky, find a place in that week’s edition, but that it would be buried somewhere on page twenty-one, maybe above the story about the council increasing parking meter charges and below the picture of a family of cats who all had one blue eye and one green, she imagined. As she typed, she became more despondent, as the story was every bit as uneventful on her screen as it was in real life, and she even considered including a line about the farmer’s wife but deleted it as quickly as she typed it because she had no evidence other than Bob’s word, and she wasn’t going to put the paper into a libellous situation. Not that David Weatherall would ever let it get past him anyway.

  She finally settled on a more factual, evidence-based piece but, as she checked it, she thought about the subject a little more, and became increasingly angry at the way Bob was being treated. She could put the facts straight, at least as far as the disease was concerned, but if it was on page twenty-one how many people would see it, compared to those who had heard the whispers?

  No smoke without fire, they would say, even some of those who saw her article, and she quickly decided that it didn’t do anything like enough to redress the balance or highlight how an innocent and honest man’s livelihood and life’s work could be potentially destroyed by a vengeful ex-spouse. The more she thought about it, and about the state of the farmhouse Bob was having to live in, the more she wrote, straying closer and closer to the divorce case without slandering anyone.

  Backed up by some Google articles on similar cases, although not involving farms, she finished the longer article and checked it, feeling pleased with herself not only for setting the record straight but also producing quite a strong commentary on the way the world could easily chew up and spit people like Bob out. But with David’s brief also in her head she emailed him both the shorter, factual version and the longer commentary piece and suggested he choose which one to publish.

  An hour later, he called her into his office, and it was immediately clear from his expression that this was one of his angry rather than miserable days, and that she had definitely contributed to it. As she walked in, he was staring over the top of his glasses at his computer monitor, eyes narrow and gleaming with several frown lines above them, so she sat down and waited for him to speak.

  ‘Interesting take on the farm story.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  His forehead creased even more. ‘That’s not praise,’ he said. ‘I was surprised you even thought I might like it.’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘Let me help you out, in case you ever think of writing a piece like that again,’ he interrupted.

  Laura gulped.

  ‘Not. In. My. Paper. If I wanted drama, there are plenty of people I would go to before you. But I don’t want drama.’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘People in this town like facts. Want facts. This is just speculation and opinion, much of which has nothing to do with Bob Greenway or his farm.’

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘It’s simple. DEFRA were called. People who buy his meat will want to know what’s going on. He got the all-clear. People will want to know that. Bob would want them to know. What’s so difficult about that?’

  Laura squirmed with embarrassment like a child again, sent to the headmaster’s office for pulling her skirt up in the playground. Her parents could make her feel small at times, but this was taking it to a whole new level.

  ‘Nothing. I just—’

  ‘Nothing. So then, I’ll delete the second version, we’ll pretend you never sent it and then you can do a quick edit of the first one and we’ll get it to press, OK?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Weatherall.’

  She hadn’t called him that since her interview but she was too afraid to be any less formal. He looked at her as if
he was already wondering why she was still there and then looked at the door, so Laura stood up and walked out, head bowed, tail firmly between her legs, as she crossed the office to her desk while the rest of the staff, the ones who had made it in, fell silent and watched her walk of shame.

  It was another reason for her to be pleased that half of the office were sick.

  14 | Laura

  Laura really wanted to dislike David Weatherall but, as hard as she tried, she found it a difficult thing to actually do.

  She sat at her desk, staring at her screen, occasionally glancing over at him behind the glass wall and wooden door that was his office, and muttering under her breath. But she couldn’t find any words that conveyed her exact thoughts; her feelings about her job had reached a new low, but she still had enough respect and admiration for the editor to stop short of throwing in her notepad and pen and walking out.

  What she really needed was for someone to make light of it, and break the cloying atmosphere that had settled over the office since she’d walked out after her dressing-down. But of course, she thought, none of them would. They’d be too busy just watching her, glad not to be on the receiving end themselves and careful not to let David think they were taking her side.

  Not that he cared either way, she thought. He was too long in the tooth to be concerned with the opinion of anyone who worked there, with the possible exception of Sue. David Weatherall simply was the Gazette. Nearly two decades earlier he had taken on the task of resurrecting the publication when it had fallen on hard times and the owners had wanted to cut their losses and find a way out. After a distinguished career with a national paper, David had been one of the high-profile casualties of spending cuts and had been made redundant. Laura had been told that several other newspapers had offered him jobs, but he had lost confidence in himself and lost his affinity with the corporate side of journalism and instead took a gamble on the Gazette, his home town’s newspaper, and purchased it for a song.

  Whereas most people would have given the ailing publication a wide berth, David made it his mission to return it to its former glory, even with the growth of online competition and the changing landscape that newspapers faced. He dedicated his every waking hour to making it a source of local pride rather than the advertisement-laden deadwood it had become, and he hired the best people he could find to help him.